The Mundane God Within Us and the Illusion of Divine Oversight

Deflating religion and mysticism by recognizing our mind’s unconscious side

Image by Ron Lach, from Pexels

Christians and Muslims say God watches over everything we do and will judge us after we die. He’ll do so not behind our back, mind you, but to our faces in the afterlife. Similarly, many Hindus and mystics say that a cosmic consciousness underlies all natural changes and that we unite with that field of awareness through meditation and spiritual discipline.

Our divided consciousness

But there’s a simpler hypothesis that accounts for this sense that what we do in life somehow has a transcendent meaning or license. There’s likely no God in the sky or in what was formerly called “Heaven,” nor is there a nonhuman consciousness that’s at the root of the physical universe.

Instead, there’s the duality between our conscious self and the unconscious side of our mind. Freud called them the Ego as ruled by the Superego, and the unconscious Id. Our waking selves are socially integrated and domesticated. We have plans we try to achieve with instrumental rationality, tailoring means to ends. We compromise and refrain from violating taboos, to be welcome in civilized society. That’s the mundane context in which our lives are largely automated by our egoistic cunning and our social roles.

Yet that’s not the whole of our mind. There are evidently degrees of conscious awareness, as indicated by our nightly dreams, actions we carry out on autopilot or that have become second nature to us, and peak states of consciousness that can be triggered by flow states of navigating the environment or by hallucinogenic drugs.

When driving a car, for example, you might be talking to the passenger, listening to music, or thinking about something else, but your brain will unconsciously calculate when to change speed or turn the steering wheel. A hidden part of your mind is driving while the more personal side of you, the spotlight of your consciousness is otherwise occupied.

The key point here is that our unconscious mind isn’t bound by social restrictions or our conscious fears and ambitions. We can overanalyze problems and tie ourselves up in knots, but our…